December 2009
It’s not the same world that I grew up in. I’ll tell you something else — it’s not the same world into which you were born. The world doesn’t change anymore in centuries. It changes in days, in weeks, and sometimes in hours.
And we have to realize that it is not the same world today that it was ten years ago!
The kind of schmutz that’s out there is unprecedented. I don’t know that ever in history has there been a period of moral dark- ness as bad as there is today.
I spent forty years of psychiatric practice primarily dealing with addictions. And most of the time, it was addiction to alcohol, addiction to drugs. More recently, Internet addiction has become extremely serious.
But I think that we have to be aware that addictions are there and that we do not have any immunity to them. You have no idea as to what category of people have fallen victim to inappropriate material on the Internet. We would not think that these type of people would be capable of it. But what happens is that the yetzer hara is working at full speed and full strength.
And I want to tell you this, my friends. Hopefully, nobody who is a yerei Shamayim is going to go look for that kind of trash and that kind of filth. However, it is perfectly possible that when monkeying around with the Internet, you hit a button and there is a popup of an inappropriate scene. You weren’t looking for it, but it happened. You have exactly three-tenths of a second to turn it off. And if you wait until four-tenths of a second, you may become addicted. That’s how severe it is.
No leeway, no leeway at all. Zero tolerance. It’s one of the most powerful addictions. And day after day after day, I get letters and calls from people who say, “What can I do to save myself?” because they have fallen into the addiction, the Internet addiction, and it has taken them all the way down. Their learning is no learning, and their davening is no davening. It has ruined more marriages than anything else. Ruined families. It’s been terribly destructive.
And I saw in one sefer that it says before the time of Mashiach, the Satan will have absolute shelitah, absolute control, and I believe that we are now ready for Mashiach, because it seems that the Satan has got absolute control in subjugating some of our finest people to this horrible addiction.